Seagate Ultra Slim PL 1TB (Old) - Partition Issues and More!

Hello,

First timer here reaching out in desperation; I will provide as much context as possible for my issue and preemptively thank you for any and all support and suggestions:

I received a work laptop and was required to add Windows 8 to my personal HDD to move the installer over to a laptop that was sent to me without any OS pre-installed.

When I had attempted to use my HDD to bring Windows 8 over, all of the files on my HDD began being sent to a "recycle bin" that was generated within the HDD.

Now my HDD is having issues with partitions and corrupted data. IT at my job tried to remotely use a few different programs to create mirrors and recovery data, etc. after sending me a 1TB WD Elements HDD to backup the files to.

The process to do so has been over like a 72 hour period which I had left the laptop on to process on multiple occasions without any resolution.

Tired with their attempts I had sought to pursue this on my own accord, I downloaded DiskDrill and have successfully created and mounted a Disk image that seemingly has my 882GB of data recovered (I can see individual media files, etc.), however, my Seagate is showing that I have 931GB capacity that is available but when attempting to recover my files to the device, stating not enough memory.

I have tried using Seagate toolkit and other programs that are on the Seagate website, but all health checks and formatting attempts have come back inconclusive.

After also attempting to use the resources including here (How to Fix a Corrupted External Hard Drive and Recover Your Data) and here (Easily Format Seagate External Hard Drive [Everything Explained] - EaseUS), including using Run command, and console to try to manually reformat, my HDD is no longer being recognized by my PC (see images included below).

Please let me know what exact information you would need to make an assessment as I am on the verge of just getting rid of my Seagate altogether and purchasing a new HDD to attempt to recover my files to.

As a side note, the Seagate is more than likely around 7 or 8 years old.

Hello,

So IT had walked me through the process of putting the Windows 8 installer onto my HDD. When attempting to extract the Windows 8 installer onto my work laptop, that's when the partition errors and everything else started to occur.

Recovery of the data isn't necessarily my issue as I have actually created a disk image which is ready to be restored on my WD HDD, however, I need the memory available on my Seagate to actually recover the files.

I've attached a screenshot of the mounted disk image and scan, which has seemed to recover my files (as mentioned, in the preview panel I can actually see media files which I know are on the Seagate).

However, my actual issue is making the Seagate usable again, I actually would just prefer to try to "factory reset" my Seagate to try to fix the errors, if that's not possible, I would just like to know if my best course of action would be to purchase a new HDD altogether, as the disk image is already loaded on my WD HDD.

Thank you and sorry for the late reply.

I'm going to give this a shot now, thank you.